MISSOURI COMMENTARY: DREARY POLITICS, DISCONTENTED NATION

We are in the spring training phase of the 1996 presidential campaign season. This is the year when candidates test their strategies and their techniques.

For President Bill Clinton the objectives are: to discourage any primary opponent from entering the race; to discourage Jesse Jackson from running as an independent candidate; to encourage Ross Perot to do so once again; and to figure out how to put together 270 votes in the Electoral College.

President George Bush was challenged within his own party by Pat Buchanan. Jimmy Carter was challenged by Ted Kennedy. Gerald Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan. Yet, no one seems ready to take Clinton on within his own party.

It's not that Clinton is viewed as an FDR-like colossus. With the uniform failure of all past intra-party challengers, there instead if a kamikaze-like fatalism about any internal challenge to an incumbent president. The 1996 Democratic nomination for president of the United States is not viewed as a prize to be coveted. the 1994 off-year election was a crushing blow to the former majority party. The components of the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society coalitions that were enough to create victories in years past seemed like tattered remnants after 1994. Winning the Democratic nomination in 1996 isn't worth the gut-wrenching effort of trying to topple your own party's national leader.

For Clinton, the mathematics of the Electoral College are discouraging. In 1992, aided by Ross Perot, he captured 370 electoral votes. Of those, 47 came form five states in the South. Write those off -- except, perhaps for six votes in Arkansas.

Clinton did better in New England in 1992 than he is likely to do in 1996. They aren't big states, but Clinton carried Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont with 19 electoral votes. In the West, Clinton isn't likely to carry state like Colorado, New Mexico, Montana and Nevada. Subtract 20 more.

Add 'em up: 47 plus 19 plus 20. For openers that's 86 fewer electoral colleges votes. This means that Clinton must carry just about every other state he carried in 1992. Lose the electoral votes in any big one -- California (54), Pennsylvania (23), Ohio (21) or New Jersey (15) -- and he's gone.

Perhaps the biggest political surprise of 1995 is the generally lackluster field of Republican challengers. The banquet-circuit star to date has been Pat Buchanan. The notion of Pat Buchanan as president was treated as a national joke in 1992. By current standards, however, Buchanan has become a pseudo-statesman. The presence of Congressman Robert Dornan in the race serves to make Buchanan look occasionally rational by comparison.

Sen. Phil Gramm runs a one-man wrecking crew promising to bring down every temple of government. For the most part, Sen. Bob Dole feels constrained to match Gramm sledge-hammer blow for sledge-hammer blow -- lest somehow the true conservatives detect a tinge of philosophical impurity.

Dole is confident he's going to win the political prize he has coveted for two decades. He wonders: Why don't these other guys fold up their tents and go away? Why are they annoying me so, forcing me to take positions further out on the political fringe -- extreme positions that may hurt me when I go face to face with Clinton?

It isn't easy to run for president at age 72 and while burdened with the chores of being Majority Leader of the Senate. It isn't easy to develop a coherent theme when you have to scramble to move as far right as some of your challengers.

Dole has dug in on one issue, separating himself from Gramm on the issue of welfare reform. Both he and Clinton put on their statesmen hates at the National Governors' Association meeting last week. The governors are experts at discerning when a politician is acting with either respectable or crass political instincts. As they presented their cases to the governors, Clinton and Dole were respectable on the issue of welfare reform.

Neither Clinton nor Dole are happy warriors. Each has his own set of troubles. If 1995 is a dour political year, then 1996 could be downright dreary. There is nothing on the horizon that can cause the American people to look forward to the presidential election with a high degree of exhilaration and anticipation. Indeed, the American people don't look forward to anything positive insofar as politics and government are concerned. A recent bipartisan poll finds the "discontent factor" at an all-time high -- higher than even at Watergate or the Iran hostage crisis.

In the heat of the summer, America is in its winter of discontent.

Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.